JOHN SMALLEY
artist / teacher
writings
A sabbatical year in Ireland:
Cloud, Cliff, and Bog, Steadfast Spirits and the Illimitable Silver Sea
After what had been a cold and gloomy June and July in the southeast of England, we arrived in Ballycastle, Ireland, on the first of August 2000 to find the sun blazing, the sea a deep azure blue, and the temperature hovering at around eighty degrees Fahrenheit.
The villagers were ecstatic. “It’s been like this for a month!” chuckled Brian Polke, proprietor of Polke’s Grocery and Pub, barely able to contain his excitement. On the endless stretches of usually deserted white sand beach, people were sunbathing and actually swimming in the sea. The austere North Mayo coast, possessed of its own weather system, regularly scoured by savage winds and relentless rain at most anytime of the year, had become almost Mediterranean. When we made this observation, over a pint of Guinness, to Brian, he smiled and informed us that “the Irish are, you know, essentially a people Mediterranean in spirit, displaced to these shores by some error of geography.”
Over the coming year, we were to see how true this was, in so many ways.
That afternoon, my wife Perrin and I, and our sons Thurston and Owen, moved into Kenny Cottage, made a pot of tea, and gazed out the front window towards the sea. Our sabbatical year had begun. I’d been awarded a ten-month painting and printmaking fellowship from The Ballinglen Arts Foundation. Perrin, who taught Ancient and Medieval History, was preparing to make a study of the neolithic and early Christian sites which abound in the vicinity, and the boys were about to begin a year at the local National School. Having spent a month in Ballycastle on a previous fellowship, we had already a developed a great love for the place and for the people we had met there.
During the evening of our first day, Peter Maxwell and Margo Dolan, the directors of the Ballinglen Arts Foundation, stopped by the cottage to deliver, to our great surprise, a stereo system. “You must have music,” said Peter, as he pointed to the window. “With this view, you must have music too.” Peter and Margo, long-time directors of contemporary art galleries in Philadelphia and New York, organised the Ballinglen Arts Foundation as a limited non-profit company in 1993. As a charity, it receives support from the Irish Arts Council and individual Irish and American contributors. The idea was to bring professional, established and younger artists of recognised ability in their fields (painting, drawing, printmaking, photography, and sculpture) from Ireland and abroad to live and work in North Mayo, one of the most remote and economically disadvantaged regions of Ireland, so as to benefit both the artists and the community.
Unlike most residency programs which operate as “retreats” and insist that artists come alone and work almost monastically, Ballinglen Fellowship artists are invited to bring family and companions with them and to experience the everyday life of the local community, its churches, shops, pubs, and its people in the belief that this interaction will, in the words of the founders, “invigorate their spirit, renew their belief in human potential, and remind them (as several artists have put it), what it is to be a grounded human being.” Each fellowship artist is provided with a purpose-built, private studio in the Ballinglen Centre and is housed at Foundation expense in a self-catering cottage in or near the village.
Artists are encouraged to stay for a minimum of one month in order to explore and respond to this unique environment.
Since mine was an extended fellowship, and since I had brought with me a small etching press, it seemed the ideal situation in which I would act as a “collaborative printmaker” during the year, working with other fellowship artists who might want to pursue printmaking projects. I also began to run a series of printmaking workshops with students from area schools, in conjunction with the Foundation’s Arts Outreach Program. I found both of these roles enormously rewarding. During the course of the year, I had the privilege of working with gifted and extraordinary artists from all over the world, from whom I learned a whole range of new techniques and approaches to studio practice. It was a bit like returning to graduate school again, only this time, my teachers were my contemporaries…
My own work benefitted a great deal from these interactions and after an initial period of working from direct observation on site out in the landscape, I began to be drawn inevitably towards pure abstraction. Increasingly, I felt that my own direct experience of this phenomenal environment was quite beyond representational or “literal description.” The absolutely elemental qualities of the landscape, the sea, and the sky all seemed to urge me to “reduce and distil” rather than describe. After visiting North Mayo, the Irish naturalist R.I. Praeger wrote of how moved he was by “ the broad undulations of the treeless moorland, the tall hills, the illimitable silver sea, the savage coastline, the booming waves, the singing wind, the smell of peat smoke and seaweed and wild thyme.”
These elements, and the still visible ruins of farms and town lands, evidence of a region largely abandoned during the Great Famine, combine to create an atmosphere laden with melancholy and mystery.
The opportunity to witness the change of seasons in this place offered us the chance to unwind and share the perennial rhythms of the local community. Bake sales, sporting events, music sessions, recitations and story-telling in local pubs, and long, leisurely conversations with villagers, farmers, and fishermen made us realise how important it is to slow down and savour the passage of each day. The openness, generosity, and steadfast spirits of the people of North Mayo made a huge and lasting impression on us.
By the time we packed up to leave Ballycastle in mid-June, we had all grown and changed in innumerable ways. The boys had made new friends, learned a bit of Irish, and had the chance to experience life in a traditional rural Irish school. Perrin had read voraciously, spent many happy hours exploring and examining historically and archaeologically important sites throughout the region, and had struck up friendships which will last a lifetime. And in the end, we had all found a second home, in a landscape at peace with itself, not unlike Seamus Heaney’s "nine-to-five man" who had seen poetry "in the heartland of the ordinary."
